A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document display apparatus and a document display method, and more particularly relates to a document display apparatus and a document display method configured to display a plurality of groups of electronic documents that include text data, picture data and/or motion picture data, that are stored on electronic medium, each electronic document or group of documents having a specific structure or form.
B. Description of the Related Art
When a plurality of electronic documents, such as text data, picture data and motion picture data, is managed and then displayed on a monitor in an information processing apparatus, such as a personal computer, the document group structure of each electronic document is managed and each electronic document is displayed based on this document group structure.
An example of a document group structure is a hyperlink structure based on hypertext wherein a link to another electronic document is embedded in an electronic document. In this hyperlink structure, each electronic document holds structure information that defines the relative relevance to linked documents having display relevance, document group structure is constructed based on this structure information, and documents are displayed in accordance with this document group structure.
In addition, there are also systems wherein the directory structure of a file system is defines the document group structure of a document group stored in that file system, and documents are displayed in accordance with the document group structure.
When browsing a plurality of electronic documents stored on an electronic medium, conventional document browsing programs display the contents of each electronic document on the display screen of the monitor based on an instruction input by the user or based on stored priorities. In this case, in a program having a function that simultaneously displays on the monitor the document group structure that includes a plurality of electronic documents, the document group structure is stored in a self-managed storage region, and this information is used when displaying the electronic documents.
If there has been a display-related instruction transmitted from an input means like a keyboard or mouse, the document group structure being managed is scanned, the need to display each electronic document is determined, and the contents of documents that need to be displayed are displayed in the display region.
Problems that the Invention is to Solve:
With such a document browsing program, in order to determine whether to display each electronic document stored in the electronic medium, it is necessary to scan all document group structures being managed and to determined whether to display of each electronic documents.
Accordingly, when the number of electronic documents being managed is enormous, a large storage region is required for managing the document group structures, and a prolonged calculation time is required for scanning the document group structures.
For example, in a window system like X Window and Microsoft Windows, a management program holds information on all windows managed, scans the document group structure of each window thereby forming a tree structure when drawing the screen, and issues drawing commands. The size of the structure that can be simultaneously managed by this program is limited to by the amount of computer resources needed by all windows. The computer resources needed to manage the structure cannot exceed available computer resources.
In addition, with a hyperlink structure based on hypertext, some document group structures are not finite and it may not be possible for a computer system to manage the entire document group structure.